Ramanuja Kavirayar

Ramanuja Kavirayar (1780, Ramanathapuram – 1853, Madras) was a Tamil savant and poet. Living in Madras, at that time the scene of the literary labours of several eminent Tamil scholars, many of whom were his own students, he dominated the world of Tamil letters.

Ramanuja Kavirayar pioneered the work of bringing Tamil classics into print for the first time, and wrote commentaries on some of them. He was also a poet. His greatest service, however, like that of Minakshisundaram Pillai, was as a teacher of Tamil. He trained a band of fine native Tamil scholars and was guru or munshi (the term then current to denote language teachers) to many of the European Tamil scholars in Madras between 1820 and 1853.

Few details of Ramanuja Kavirayar’s early life are known. His father was one Rangien as stated in a verse at the end of a Tamil translation of a Sanskrit work called ‘Atmabodham’. Ramanujam was a contemporary of Ashtavadhanam Peria Saravanaperumal Kavirayar of Ramanathapuram. Both of them learnt Tamil at the feet of Somasundaram Pillai, a deeply learned and religious man, one of the 12 personal disciples of the celebrated Sivagnana Swamigal.

Ramanuja Kavirayar was the guru of George Uglow Pope (1820–1908), a Christian missionary who spent many years in Tamil Nadu and translated many Tamil texts into English, including the Tirukkural and Tiruvachagam.

Pope has given currency to an interesting story relating to Ramanuja Kavirayar, which throws some light on his early life.

My first teacher of Tamil (Ramanuja Kavirayar) was a most learned scholar long dead (peace to his ashes) who possessed more than any man I have known, the cleverness, ingenium perfervidum. He was a profound and zealous Vaishnavite. I remarked one day about a long white line or scar on his neck, where his rosary of Eleocarpus beads are hung and ventured to ask him (I had to wait for such occasions for the mollia temporafandi) its history.

Well, said he, "When I was a boy I could learn nothing. Nothing was clear to me and I could remember nothing. But I felt my whole soul full of intense love of learning. So in despair, I went to a temple of Saraswathi (the goddess of learning) and with a passionate prayer, I cut my throat and fell bleeding at her feet. In a vision she appeared to me and promised I should become the greatest of Tamil scholars. I recovered, and from that day, by her grace I found all things easy and I am what she said I should be. I believe he was so and from that noble, enthusiastic teacher I learnt to love Tamil and to reverence its ancient professors."

— George Uglow Pope, writing from Oxford in England in 1886

This story of Pope explains in some measure the background for Ramanuja Kavirayar’s consciousness of his high mission as a dedicated teacher endowed with a domineering even aggressive nature, which evoked a natural reaction among his compeers.

After a thorough study of Tamil literature and grammar Ramanuja Kavirayar came to Madras in 1820 and settled down as a teacher and man of letters working with single-minded devotion and enthusiasm, till his death in 1853, for the cause of Tamil learning and Tamil culture. He taught Tamil to many students and also published several books of his own and others, for which, it is stated, he had the control of a printing press. He soon gained fame for his scholarship and came to be referred to as Ilakkanakkadal and lyarramilasiriyar.

Among his many eminent pupils were Visakhaperumal Aiyar and his half-brother Saravanaperumal Aiyar. Vishakaperumal Aiyar attained fame as an editor and commentator and was for several years the head of Tamil Department of the Madras University. Saravanaperumal Aiyar was also an equally well-known scholar, blessed with a philosophical bent of mind and such catholicity of outlook that he sang a brilliant NANMANIMALAI on the great Muslim-mystic and Tamil poet Gunangudi Masthan.

Of Ramanuja Kavirayar's European Tamil students, the most prominent were Pope, Miron Winslow, William Hoyles Drew and C. T. E. Rhenius. All were Christian missionaries devoted to the cause of Tamil studies. He not only taught them Tamil literature and grammar, but also collaborated with them in some of their important works. Ramanuja Kavirayar's role in the preparation of Winslow's (1862) English-Tamil dictionary is acknowledged in Winslow's preface: "In the preparation of this work, the compiler has been aided at different times by competent natives. Of these the first was Ramanuja Kavirayar." Ramanuja Kavirayar helped W H Drew in his English translation of the first two books of the Thirukkural which the Kavirayar himself brought out with his own special notes and Parimelazhagar’s gloss.

For more than 30 years, Ramanuja Kavirayar was in the forefront of an illustrious band of Tamil scholars of Madras like Thandavaraya Mudaliar, Kanchipuram Sabhapathy Mudaliar, Kazhathur Vedagiri Mudaliar, Purasai Ashtavadhanam Sabhapathy Mudaliar, Ashtavadhanam Veeraswami Chettiar, Thiruvengatachala Mudaliar of Egmore, Visakhaperumal Aiyar and his brother, Mazhavai Mahalingam Aiyar and a host of others, who were the early pioneers in the great and formidable task of bringing the treasures of Tamil language, literature and grammar into print in the modern sense.

Ramanuja Kavirayar was greatly admired by his pupils, and respected by the most distinguished of his scholastic and intellectual opponents. It is a tragedy that he occupied no recognisable official position and founded no school. Perhaps this was so because he simply said and wrote what seemed to him to be exact and true, in his own unemphatic, careful prose, with all the qualifications that the truth seemed to demand.

He did not modify or shape his thought to make it fit into a system. He did not exaggerate or over-schematise in order to obtain or attract attention for his ideas. He had an acute, ironical humour, was obstinate under attack, and could not be either snubbed or bullied. Yet he was courteous, serious and charming, and his movements and words possessed a dignity and humanity wholly unrelated to the popular image of him in the last 30 years of his life.